And there, more than two years after the first lockdown started, a new sentiment flares up. A deep, dark, swirling rage: We’ve missed two years of our lives, and before what?
‘Had to let my life pass for two years because of that cunt Hugo’, columnist Ebru Umar said in a high tone, Bee PowNed† ‘Healthy people under the age of 50 were exposed to the same restrictions as sick people over 70’, Leon de Winter grumbles, in a Telegraph-column which suddenly turns around. “Lockdowns don’t work, if they are lifted, the virus will return.”
Anyway, those are columnists, but the thought also haunts some more moderate people. ‘For the past two years I have looked obsessively at numbers and have been able to conclude with a cool head that the danger was quite small’, one of them e-mailed. ‘In the end, whether or not a lockdown did not matter that much, the experience in Sweden has shown that.’
Understandably, somewhere. Because now that the measures are gone: where is that virus now? Yes, you can get it and it’s annoying, with some headaches and coughing. But how many people actually get sick from that virus?
People are also short of memory. When the virus first spread around the world, there was every reason to be concerned. In northern Italy, corona has led to horrendous conditions, with overcrowded hospitals, hastily mined mass graves and army trucks hauling away the dead at night. All that remained was the emergency brake on the transmission of the virus, by breaking contact between people as much as possible. Politics was unanimously in favour. The main criticism was that the cabinet was not strict enough.
Since then, 40 thousand people have died from corona in our country, and 100 thousand people have ended up in hospital. And that was with measures. With the basic figures of the virus, obtained in areas where corona could circulate unhindered, it is easy to calculate that such a virus would occur without intervention. 135 thousand Dutch people would have died. A quarter of a million would have ended up in hospital. The measures have thus saved almost 100 thousand people’s lives, and almost double that number of hospital admissions.
And no, we did not ‘extend the life years of over-90s by weeks’, as Umar writes, because many victims still had years to live. That’s how one died 3,100 people under 65whose roughly half was just healthy before that, and more than 12 thousand Dutch people between 65 and 80† In the meantime, 27 thousand of those under-50s who, according to Leon de Winter, would be so invulnerable, were in hospital. Without measures there would have been more than 150 thousand. And an estimated 40 thousand extra people of working age would have ended up on a ventilator in the ICU.
In Sweden, meanwhile, people reasoned: this is going to be a long session, so it’s better to keep schools and public life open as much as possible. That did indeed save economic damagebut also cost many preventable sick and deaths, was recently the damning verdict of an international academic evaluation† Mortality, for example, was ten times higher than in the neighboring countries of Norway and Denmark – a comparison with the Netherlands is difficult, because Sweden is less internationally connected, has a more open hinterland and a more law-abiding population.
What critics such as Umar and De Winter actually mean is: I hated those stupid measures – but then packaged in quasi-scientific epidemiologist language, because then they might listen better. They are right on one point: nobody knows what the corona measures will ultimately cause for collateral damage, through financial losses, missed opportunities, lost years of education and development.
But just as the blind spot of the corona policy is the future, so is the blind spot of the complainants. As if there had been a reality without lockdowns in which the virus was just a flu, easily curbed by keeping grandpa and grandma indoors, plus an extra vitamin for resistance perhaps.
Unfortunately. The experience with places where interventions were delayed and those with earlier epidemics shows something different. The peak would be shorter, but also more intense.
In a panic, public life would still be locked. Out of fear, or simply because too many people get sick at the same time. And in the aftermath, there had been a tsunami of bereaved relatives, traumatized healthcare workers, former IC patients and post-covid patients who have to undergo long-term rehabilitation and who may need benefits for life.
Also not good for the economy, I would say.